Does Something Like A Nigerian Yuppie Culture Exist In Nigeria?

The term yuppie (short for "young urban professional" or "young upwardly-mobile professional") refers to a market segment whose consumers are characterized as self-reliant, financially secure individualists.


The term yuppies first appeared until in the early 1980s.

Joseph Epstein is sometimes credited for coining the term in 1982. However, an early printed appearance of the word is in a May 1980 Chicago magazine article by Dan Rottenberg. In 1983, the term gained currency in United States when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had "gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie". The headline of Greene's story was From Yippie to Yuppie. The proliferation of the word was effected by the publication of The Yuppie Handbook in January 1983, followed by Senator Gary Hart's 1984 candidacy as a "yuppie candidate" for President of the United States.The term was then used to describe a political demographic group of socially liberal but fiscally conservative voters favoring his candidacy. Newsweek magazine declared 1984 "The Year of the Yuppie", characterizing the salary range, occupations, consumer lifestyles and politics of yuppies .
In a 1985 issue of The Wall Street Journal, Theressa Kersten at SRI International described a "yuppie backlash" by people who fit the demographic profile yet express resentment of the label: "You're talking about a class of people who put off having families so they can make payments on the BMWs ,  To be a Yuppie is to be a loathsome undesirable creature". Leo Shapiro, a market researcher in Chicago, responded, "Stereotyping always winds up being derogatory. It doesn't matter whether you are trying to advertise to farmers, Hispanics or Yuppies, no one likes to be neatly lumped into some group".[2]

Later, the word lost its political connotations and, particularly after the 1987 stock market crash, gained the negative socio-economic connotations it enjoys today. By 1991, TIME proclaimed the death of the yuppie in a mock obituary.